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Why does Eve seem like...
cybrinsanity
Member Posts: 106
in EVE Online
It's on a serious come back, not that it was ever down and out but it seems to be growing steadily in popularity, did something happen that I am unaware of within the last 6months or year?? was there a new expansion or something?? whats all the hubbub about?? just curious because I may start it up again..
Comments
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. EVE just has a lot of things going for it, not the least of which is its uniqueness. It's not a fantasy game, it's not a PVE game, it's on one server, the expansions are free, and it's fairly challenging.
Add all that together and you have a game that has seen steady and consistent growth year after year.
Personally, I think the improved graphic are a big part of EVE's current growth (but that’s just me). When you really think about it, the list of new game play features that have been added over the years is pretty impressive.
In the end, I think it's just a solid well made game, and it may be one you enjoy. : )
I think it's just that more people are getting tired of themepark MMOs and there's not really many good non-themepark MMOs besides Eve at the moment.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
EvE is ever more thoroughly penetrating the collective consciousness as the one true current alternative to fantasy quest-grind-raid-for-loot fantasy stuff mmos. I've considered subbing myself, but decided against it for the simple reason that I hate the idea of being years behind everyone else in skillpoints. Over-time skill aquirement kind of ruins EvE for me, because I like to be one of the best at what I do, and what I would do would most likely be crafting. I don't want to have to play the game for three years just to be competetive. That being said, it's still THE mmo on the market, as far as I can see. Holding myself over with Galactic Civilizations II until SWTOR or GW2 deliver on some promises.
"Speaking haygywaygy or some other gibberish with your mum doesn't make you foreign."
-baff
Nonsense. If you want to start an account for crafting only..it will only take you a few weeks before you can make over 90% of the items in game. 3 years sounds like a number pulled directly from your 4th point of contact. The char portrait you see was originally started as a crafting/mining character..now with neural remapping...all the race/origin selections are for appearence only.
I would ask you to download EvEMON and search out what it is you feel like you want to construct that would take you THREE years to train for. If you want to train for T3 construction, that will take some time. Who cares..you'll get there when you get there. I can build just about everything, and I build about 20-30 items on a reg basis.
You need to understand that skillpoints is nothing more a leash(PvP-wise) to allow you to make mistakes. Losing a clone with my experience costs alot of money. I would never had been able to afford that as a rookie. Now I can, b/c I'm not an idiot, and try not to pilot drunk.
In closing, if you are looking only to mine/craft/build/industry...you can be up and running within weeks. You can also use several T1 frigs/cruisers/battlecruisers in a few weeks, to allow you to make money. Not starting b/c you are a perfectionist means that your meticulous nature would endear you to the intricasies of EvE. I think you are looking at this from the exact opposite direction.
Good luck in finding a game that suits you and your play style.
Playing: BF4/BF:Hardline, Subnautica 7 days to die
Hiatus: EvE
Waiting on: World of Darkness(sigh)
Interested in: better games in general
Possibly due to a partial reform of the way that CCP does things? They kind of dropped the ball mid 2009-mid 2010
Give me liberty or give me lasers
Anyway, the skills thing. Christ on a bike I'm sick of seeing the same old misconception over and over. Look people it works like this: "normal" MMOs have clases and a level cap, but EVE doesn't. Except that actually it does. Confused? Well let me explain.
In a normal elves and wizards game, your class is inherent in your character. If you're an Archer, for example, then ranged dps is what you are.
In EVE, your character is classless. You're just a little pod that cant do anything except zip around rather slowly. But! You take on a class when you board a ship. The ships are the character classes. Many EVE ships have a pretty direct equivalence to Elves and Wizards character classes: a logistics ship is a healer class if ever I saw one. A Megathron is a straight up melee-range DPS ship - call it a barbarian. Other ships aren't quite so easy to pigeon-hole, because EVE is a space game and it's also very complcated, so there are roles which dont easily translate into Elves and Wizards classes.
Nevertheless, whatever ship you're in directly defines your abilities in terms of restrictions, statistics, bonuses and special abilities in almost exactly the same way as a character class does.
Now here's the kicker: your classless, non-SP-capped character's skills will define how good those bonuses and abilities are. But only some of them. A strictly finite number, in fact. And all those skills are capped: once they get to level 5, they're as good as they can possibly be. Once you have every skill that applies to a given ship at 5 you have reached level cap in the character class that ship represents.
After that, all you can do is start to "level cap" other ships, but that wont make the least bit of difference to your ability in the ship you have "level capped" in. You can train up as many other skills as you like but it wont make you even a tiny bit better. And you can only fly one ship at once, so all the other level caps dont make any difference at all.
Here's me:
Dang, that's quite a lot of SP, right? Oh noes you will never catch up, woe to the noob with 1 million SP who encounters me, I have 86 times as many so I must be 86 times as powerful (that's maths, right?)
Well speaking of Archers, let's imagine I'm in a Cerberus. Nice ship, great at ranged DPS, death to Falcons and careless frigates. It's EVE's Archer class.
Well for a start, the cerb has no drone bay. -6,769,803 SP. Those drone skills are utterly useless: I might as well never have trained a single SP in any of them.
It doesn't have any turret slots either. So the only gunnery skills that apply are Weapon Upgrades and Adv Weapon upgrades (these are actually fitting skills, not really gunnery skills as such). -14,023,554 SP
It's a Tech 2 Caldari HAC. None of the T3 subsystems skills apply; -5,120,000 SP right there. The only spaceship command skills that apply are Caldari Cruiser 5, Spaceship Command 5, Heavy Assault Ships 5. Technically you could say that Caldari Frigate applies, because you have to train it to at least 4 to train the other skills, likewise the Assault ships skill. I'll count those at 4, which is the pre-requisite level. Wow, this is a big one: -21,943,724 SP
Ok, the list goes on, although we'd be getting down to individual skills after this point, There are still many millions more SP to come off, in Electronics, Mechanics, and of course the non-combat categories like Social and Trade... but already I've "lost" over 45M SP just by considering a few skill categories. Suddenly, "catching up" doesn't seem quite so impossible after all. Especially when you notice that I'm not at level 5 in quite a few skills that do apply; my Navigation skills are average, I only have Heavy Missile Spec to 3 etc etc. I'm not really "level capped" with the Cerberus class, although I'm close. I'm not level capped in anything really, because I've chosen diversity over specialisation.
And finally, you can even catch up to me in the absolute and literal sense of total SP, because soon I'm going to stop training Malc. He already has just about every skill I want on him. If he trains past 92.5M SP, his clone cost (how much it costs to respawn if I get him killed) will jump 50%, and it's already quite significant. So I'm going to stop him training at about 90M SP and start training an alt on the account. People also simply quit the game, or get bored of their characters and decide to start again.
Give me liberty or give me lasers
That's crap...you can get in a properly skilled Drake in less than 3 weeks.
And like a previous poster mentioned..you can have the proper skills you need to make profit from manufacturing in no time at all. Something tells me you haven't actually invested the time with the game, otherwise you would have a competely different opinion of it.
Everything Malcanis said is very true.
The easiest way to explain the skill point misconception is this;
Every skill has 5 ranks, and not every skill has an immediate use at any given time.
You can max out every possible aspect of a certain ship-type (combat or otherwise), as well as various domestic skills like trading and mining/extraction. A 5-year vet is as good as anyone else that has the exact same skills as him in an area, but since he played longer, he prolly has points in all sorts of other stuff. So to sum it up, older players maxed out long ago in their favored combat or trade skills, and their points now go into dabbling with other stuff. There are TONS to choose from after all, but for vets with that many SP invested their costs of clones skyrocket.
Smart PvPers make a character maxed out on whatever ship setup he prefers (3-6 months to a year, depending), then use the SP gain on a side character they don't expect to die all the time.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
Just wanted to say thanks to everyone who took the time to clear up my misconceptions regarding the skill system. A couple of posts seemed unecessarily hostile, but I suppose you deal with said misconceptions a lot around here, so sorry again for ruffling feathers.
I don't claim to be an authority on this game whatsoever, I want to make that clear. I played a bit of trial time, and was told in game by more than one person that it would take me years to achieve the skill caps necessary to be a competitive player. I took certain people at their word, which is my own fault. Based on the info you guys have given, I think I'll be subbing to EvE some time soon.
Thanks again!
"Speaking haygywaygy or some other gibberish with your mum doesn't make you foreign."
-baff
Good for you man, this is the right kind of attitude. Sadly the noob corp channels are filled with people who do nothing but make excuses for their own failure to play the game, and these are the kind of people you encountered. EVE will seem huge and dangerous and daunting at first, but do all the tutorial missions, maybe make a friend or two in game, and then start asking how to do things not whether you should do them.
My one-line advice: Download the ISK guide, skim through it, and train Rifters!
Give me liberty or give me lasers
Lol, you're funny. Focusing on the amount of skill points you have is just for e-peen and so to me what you're saying is you don't like other people having larger e-peens than you. My question is; why do you even care? And if you want to be the best at what you do (no matter what the game is) you have to start from the bottom. I started from the bottom on exploration and now I claim myself to be one of the only awesome class 5 wormhole solo explorers around, sleeper vamps be damned.
Dude, if you really wanted to play this game you wouldn't care about skillpoints or the like because you'd know that as long as you're moving you'll get to where you're going.
This is not a game.
Good discussion on the vet vs. the noob skill point wise, but I'll try to answer your OP here...
There have indeed been new expansions in the last year as there always is in EVE.
Last sping/summer Planetary Interaction was released which allows the harvesting of planetary resources that were until then only available from NPCs. These resources are used in the manufacturing of mostly Tech 2 items such as mods and POS installations among other things thus opening up a whole new area of industry and marketing.
This past fall/winter Incursions was released which is an advanced PvE basicly. The short explanation is that the Sanshas invade various, random locations spanning numerous systems and constellations. This causes a decrease in many other EVE endeavors and adversely affects the whole area. The players need to band together and coordinate their attacks in order to repulse the incursion. The longer the incursion holds, the stronger it gets.
Along with Incursions, the much maligned and hated Learning skils were completely removed from the game AND the new Character Creator was introduced which is an astounding piece of programming.
Since mid-fall, after an uproar from the players concerning the timetable that CCP released regarding fixes and polishing of existing game features and mechanics, CCP has done an about-face and is steadily improving many aspects of the game as well as taking more time to communicate with the player base through Dev Blogs and forum interaction.
And finally, all of this is leading up to the upcoming summer release of Incarna (Walking-in-Stations) which has been talked about for years, and eventually, all of this will tie into Dust 514 within the next one to two years.
So there ya have it. The hubbub is due to EVE's moving forward towards these expansions and actually fixing and polishing things that have been on the books for far too long. EVE is becoming better with each new update and expansion (for the most part) and is heading for new things just over the horizon. EVE has always been a great niche game and the best sandbox MMO in existence, but if CCP's vision holds to make EVE the all-encompassing Sci-Fi Space Game (see EVE: A Future Vision on YouTube or on my blog), it will move from its niche classification to a more mainstream MMO with a long history and a long future, and one that will be almost impossible to beat.
~ Adder ~
Quick, Silent, Deadly
Short of some of the more advanced skillsets, it only takes a few months or less to get to the point where you can do pretty much anything as well as anyone else skillwise. It's just a matter of focused training. The only thing you'll never catch up on is the sheer variety of stuff a single character might be able to do.
The system was designed fairly smart as a over-time system. A 100m skillpoint character isn 't necessarily "more powerful" than a 20m skillpoint character. He can just do a lot of different things.
Also, buying characters from other players and buying In-game currency from CCP is completly legal. If you play few months and spend some ISK, you can buy awesome character that will melt faces in pvp or craft awesome ships for pvpers. My "crafting/mining/trade" alt has only 12m sp(thats about 6 months training), but i can build all of the ships in-game exept titans and T3 ships, but i dont need to build titans, because i'm not in a big corp that can afford titans. I can also fly the best mining ship(hulk) and i have good trading skills, that help me make money from market manipulation.
Skills gained over time instead of from effort is just a way for CCP to make more money.
You are all falling for it hook, line, and sinker.
Also, people only play EVE because it's the only good space MMO out. Black Prophecy failed horribly when they decided to make it instanced.
Keep in mind that being the only good MMO in a certain genre doesn't mean the game is actually good, it just means it's the game with the least BS that people have to put up with. They fool themselves into liking it because they don't know what else to do. Anybody who claims to like EVE is in denial.
If there was only one way to break your arm, people would regard that as the BEST way.
EVE is the best space mmo currently out just because all other space mmos are pure rubbish.
I hardly see anything challenging EVE in the future, it's the best because its managed to turn space into a viable mmo. I often hear people saying things like, "oh they should've made it where you fly with a joystick, so it uses real skill, like X3 or Freespace 2, and have a physics engine like that". Really like X3 or Freespace 2? You know what multiplayer dogfights were like in Freespace 2? You circled each other endlessly in space going in retardedly fast tight circles just trying to get a lock and spraying blasters. In X3 sure you can dogfight, but PVP in EVE isn't done with fighters. I encourage anyone who thinks joysticks are a good idea to grab a carrier or battleship in X3 and tell me how responsive that joystick is. Holding down the joystick to slowly manuever isn't my idea of fun, I'd rather be focusing on fighting. Guns are automated in big ships in X3 anyway. The physics are an absolute mess, they're nowhere near realistic and just bumping anything with a large ship will usually destroy the smaller vessel. Skill training over time is the best thing to ever happen to mmos. I wish other games would adopt it. It takes out all the poop socking, all the grind, and leaves the player open to interact and adapt. So what if you wait 14 days to level up that specialization skill up to 5. What's that translate to, a 2% bonus over the level 4 guy? Horizontal progression is where its at, it doesn't take that long, a lot of skills take no more than 5 days to level up to 5, sure some take up to a month but those are pretty few. Nobody maxes, everyone can survey or specialize, but no one has a signficant advantage over anyone else in skills. It all comes down to tactics, fitting, and metagame. If they made a game just like EVE with twitch based gameplay and regular vertical skill progression, I'd still play EVE. It'd be the better game.
I don't know. I enjoy Eve and all for what it is. But I would like to see full control of my ship at least as an option sometime. Even if it's just for shits and giggles. I'm not particularly a big fan of the combat either, but even with full control of your ship, it wouldn't be any better.
0118 999 881 999 119 725... 3
Even as a new player, I love EVE's skill system and lack of levels. It really lets you focus on whichever aspect of the game you enjoy the most without having to worry about getting to the level cap. Unfortunately for me, I decided to focus on EVE's missions and combat, which I found extremely boring. It's hard to blame CCP though, as I myself can't think of a way to make space combat fun with such ships without throwing physics out the window.
Simple answer.. the devs are insane ... which is awesome !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgvM7av1o1Q
I think I am in love.......
"That's ludicrous. Are you seriously suggesting that I get better at the game in order to compete?"-Random Failure in the Global Agenda Beta forums.